Is Gary safe enough? (Brazil: crime, homes, schools)

[artemis]

Robertsdale is part of Hammond.

[artemis]

Hammond Streets Placement and Patterns


**The Robertsdale/Roby areas of Hammond also took part in naming some of their streets after their founding families as well. Here are a few prime examples - Burton Court - named for W. M. Burton, a chemist at Standard Oil Company. Atchison Avenue - named after Robert Atchison, early area resident. Warick Avenue - named for W. E. Warick, a plant supervisor at Standard Oil Company. Caroline Avenue - named for Mrs. Jacob Forsythe, sister of George Clark.**

[americanemocouple]

cool....

Still if I would have known what type of **** I would experience here I would have chose Munster... and not Robertsdale... a part of hammond.

[americanemocouple]

p.s.

46394 last time I checked was a whiting zip code. Which would be our zip code.

[artemis]

Yes, the US Postal Service routes Robertsdale's mail thru the Whiting Post Office, but Robertsdale is still part of Hammond.

[domergurl]

Originally Posted by americanemocouple

p.s.

46394 last time I checked was a whiting zip code. Which would be our zip code.

I thought you guys were happy when you moved to Whiting ... not so???

[RegionAire]

Maybe if you own a tank or some sort of troop carrier. Seriously, and I don't mean any offense, but Gary is not a safe community...especially for someone who has no bearings in the area. Maybe someday Gary will be an inviting place (I personally think it's a latent gold-mine), but not yet. Please take one of the other poster's advice and either get a place in Chicago (there are some reasonably inexpensive areas) or in Whiting/Hammond if money is your concern. There are safer ways to conserve your money without inviting personal disaster.

[pcg]

To the OP. Have you done any research on the city of Gary? It has in the past had the honors of being murder capital of the country. Miller is the best part of the city, but still in the city.

Racism is alive and well in Gary. If you are black you will have a better chance of survival than any other race. If you are not black I would suggest you look elsewhere.

[summer22]

Miller Beach has some new $400-$500K homes going up on the very east edge - I think the development is called "East Edge" and is right along the county line. I believe over 20 homes were planned and the development was a "green" or LEED-certified development. The developer --- I met him once --- moved to the area from Chicago and fell in love with the location and the lakeshore.

About at that point too are two beaches -- the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore West Beach and a "Miller Beach" entrance where they charge $5-$10 for parking. Across the county line along US12 in Portage is a new gated community with $500+ luxury homes and townhomes.

The Miller Beach beach --- I've been there several times and I've never been able to figure out whether its owned and operated by the city of Gary (there are really no signs indicating that) or if its a private party that has lake access and operates the parking lot and beach.

Being at that location in Miller means you can basically do all of your shopping, entertainment, etc. in Porter County (Portage) which means you'll have no worries as far as safety.

Living in Miller, seems like it would be decent because the area is separated from the rest of Gary by train tracks and US 12/20, but you would still be what is called an "urban pioneer." There is a little commercial strip with a bakery and cafe on Lake Street on the west edge of Miller. There seems to be no commercial anything along US 12, even though that seems like it would be a logical and fairly safe place for development to come in.

Oh and as far as pricing -- yes you would get a lot of bang for your buck in Miller Beach, probably could rent a large home at a good price. Also note there are a still a number of Chicago families that have summer homes in Miller Beach.

This next statement is just an observation --- don't read anything into it please, its just what I've observed --- but every time I've been to the beach at "Miller Beach" -- the one on the county line but on the Lake County side where you pay $5 for parking --- the beachgoers have been all white and appeared to be middle class or higher.

One last comment about price --- check Chicago Craigslist and yes you can find small apartments for $550 - $750 in decent areas along Sheridan Road near Chicago's lakefront or in Evanston. If you were willing to be roommates with people, you might be able to find something between $400 and $500. So, you're not limited to living in Gary just because of your budget.

[summer22]

I found that developer's website. If you do a Google search for Miller and East Edge Homes you'll find it. It looks like its missing a lot of information, so, I don't know if that means he's out of business, or, if he's just redeveloping his site. It was about 5 years ago that I last heard about it.

Here's also a 2006 article I found through Google. Again without taking a ride over there I can't tell if there's been progress on the development since then. Don't know if the recession has affected it or not. This article is from Indiana Economic Digest of April 16th of that year. I'm not allowed to post the link so here is the text of the article. It says that most buyers in Miller Beach are second home buyers.

GARY | A lakefront home carrying a $1 million-plus price tag hit the market this year, a first for Miller Beach.

The breakthrough could be a sign of better things to come for the community built on a stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline bookended by steel mills.

"It's definitely a sea change here," said Gene Ayers, whose family-run Ayers Realty is a Miller Beach mainstay since the 1920s.

Realtors hope the rising demand for vacation homes will re-fuel interest in the beachfront community, only now emerging from a hit delivered a few years ago when parts of Lake County saw residential property taxes spike after a state-wide reassessment.

Before the tax hike, Miller Beach home values had been moving up the charts on par with those in lakefront communities further east: Ogden Dunes, Dune Acres, Porter Beach and others, in counties not as hard hit by fallout from the reassessment, Ayers said.

Afterward, values continued to rise, "but not like they had been," Ayers said.

Efforts to mitigate the tax, including a temporary 2 percent cap put in place by local officials, are helping property values to rebound.

"What we have in store for us is a nice jump in values, for sure in the next couple of years," he said.

Buyers recently snapped up two vacant lakefront lots in the upper-$400,000 range, Ayers said.

In what has become a common scenario, one of the buyers was a Chicagoan, Ayers said.

Donna Hofmann, an agent with Coldwell Banker in nearby Chesterton, said the majority of buyers for the beachfront properties she deals in -- exclusively in Porter and LaPorte counties -- come from Chicago and its suburbs.

Most are seeking a getaway from the city.

"About 90 percent of the houses in the beach areas are second homes, and the majority of the buyers are 50-plus," Hofmann said.

"The 50-plus group are looking at it long-term, possibly as a retirement place as they leave their professions," she said. "Some are keeping an apartment in the city and a house at the beach."

Baby Boomers and others are snapping up vacation homes at record rates, the National Association of Realtors reported this year.

Vacation home sales increased 16.9 percent last year to a record 1.02 million, from 872,000 in 2004, according to the report, based on 2005 surveys.

Baby Boomers are at the optimum point to make such purchases, Association chief economist David Lereah said.

"They're at the peak of their earnings; interest rates remain historically low and boomers want to diversify their investments," Lereah said.

The rate of second-home purchases has gone through the roof, said Blanche Evans, editor of Dallas-based Realty Times.

"Because people are strapped for time," Evans said, "the closer by they can get their second home, the better."

Some buyers are willing to go up to 500 miles away, if quick, cheap commuter flights are available, Evans said.

"Otherwise, they want it to be an easy drive," Evans said.

Miller Beach, established in the late 19th century and later annexed by Gary, is the closest of the Indiana beachfront communities to Chicago, about an hour away, and often less.

It's still catching up to neighboring beachfront communities further east, in terms of appeal as a vacation-home mecca.

Still, Ayers said, about 75 percent of buyers in Miller Beach are in the second-home market.

Its location within the struggling Gary school system district limits the number of families who buy year-round homes in Miller Beach, Ayers said. "There's a lot of singles."

Gary's blue-collar history -- the city is home to U.S. Steel -- could hold buried potential.

"Developers are going to take advantage of rundown blue-collar housing and turn it into white collar," the Realty Times' Evans said.

East Edge, being developed in Miller Beach, might be a case in point.

Land for developer Jay Gallagher's planned 28 upscale homes and townhomes once housed 40 concrete-block two-flats built about 50 years ago and razed as they fell into disrepair in the 1980s.

Long-time Miller Beach real estate agent Len Pryweller bought the land piece by piece as it went on the market, and sold it last year to Gallagher, Pryweller said.

Gallagher had completed a loft-style development in Chicago and was scouting new projects when the Miller Beach land came available, he said.

A transplanted Chicagoan, Gallagher said he and his wife, Ann, discovered Miller Beach and bought a home there in 1999.

"We were looking for a single-family home because we were tired of living in a condo. We saw an ad in the paper that said lakefront. We'd never been to Miller Beach," he said. "We just fell in love with it."

He opened the first East Edge Homes structure last month, a single-family home being shown as a model.

Plans are for 12 single-family homes, priced between $429,000 and $519,000, and 16 townhomes priced at just under $300,000, bordering a common area at the center.

The Miller Beach community appears poised to enter the second-home market, said Evans.

"In order for that to be viable, there has to be places to go and things to do, so you can look forward to appreciation," Evans said.

That could take time.

While it has a number of highly regarded restaurants, including the Miller Bakery Cafe, and a single grocery market, "what we're lacking most of all is other kinds of shopping," Ayers said.

That's something Miller Beach will have to overcome, said Gallagher.

"It's not New Buffalo, with all kinds of cutesy shops," Gallagher said of the trendy Michigan resort community.

"But we are across from a national park," Gallagher added.

The community's future could be similar to the South Loop in Chicago, where decaying inner-city structures were replaced with upscale condominiums and homes.

"(South Loop) was such a natural location, but it just never happened. It took a few developers going in and, before you know it, everybody's in the South Loop," Gallagher said.